Whats skills were used to create instagram?

Hi Hackey,

A similar question was asked on this Forum a few months ago. It's a good discussion if you care to read the whole thing.

I'll quote my own answer that might help you here. A lot of this will be covered in the Build a Self-Desctructing Message iPhone App course, which is scheduled to be released on Wednesday.

So let's take Instagram as an example. They have three frontends:

• The iPhone app
• The Android app
• The web page

The apps do the same thing. You log in or sign up, take photos, add a filter, and post/share. You can also view, like, and comment on other photos and follow people. With the web page, you can view, like, and comment on other photos (you just can't take the photos or upload anything).

The backend is everything that happens when you take an action. So when you sign in, you send your username and password to the server. The server is the backend. On that server, your credentials are checked against a database (another part of the backend). A response is sent back to the app saying whether you are logged in or not. This is the job of the backend.

Same thing with the photos--once you hit "share", the photos and whatever caption you enter are uploaded to the server (backend). They're stored in the database (backend). When you or others view your photos, you send a request to the server (backend) to serve up whatever photos you want to see.

So the backend in this example includes the servers, the database, and the programming that makes it all work together. This programming, which is done in a server-side language like Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, or Node.js, handles your requests, performs actions against the database, and serves some kind of response over the network back to the client.